Cooking Hamsi with Friends in Istanbul

As much as I like cooking by myself, cooking with friends is much more fun!

Recently, I met up with a couple friends at our Turkish friend’s house to learn how to make three types of Turkish hamsi (anchovy) dishes. I like eating hamsi at the meyhane, so I figured I finally should learn how to cook it too.

My Turkish friend, Ayşe, and I met through a mutual friend a few months after I moved to Istanbul in 2010. I was new, and my American friend, Sharon, was good at connecting people together. She was like, “You bake, and Ayşe cooks, so you two should meet.”

We’ve both learned a few tricks in the kitchen from each other since we met.

Ayşe, who lived in the U.S. for 20+ years, is an amazing Turkish home cook. Every day, she sends her husband off with a home-cooked lunch for his staff and himself. You can find her teaching cooking lessons through the International Women of Istanbul as well.

I recently hoped she was going to help us demystify the Turkish hamsi, which comes from the Black Sea region of Turkey. As I said, I enjoy eating hamsi, but I can never quite bring myself to buy these little suckers to cook at home myself. These delectable fish are small, and they scare me. (Remember I grew up in Nebraska – the land of cows.)

Ayşe’s menu for that day included the popular hamsi tava (or fried anchovies that arrives at the table like a crispy plate of little fish), hamsi baked in the oven with tomatoes and onions, and hamsi stuffed with Turkish cheddar cheese and parsley and then fried. Anything fried always tastes better, right?

We all took turns trying to clean these little suckers. Ayşe’s helper, Elif, made it look so simple. Break the bone by the head and then pull down, basically deboning and degutting the fish all in one easy stroke. 

Cleaning Turkish hamsi is a messy job, but someone has to do it.

I badly cleaned about seven hamsi and then gave up. If I had kept cleaning them, we would have been eating a hamsi soup instead of hamsi tava!

Spending the day with international friends and cooking together was fun! My favorite dish of the day was and still is the hamsi tava.

Left, hamsi baked with tomatoes and onions, and hamsi tava on the right. All served with traditional cornbread.

Even though Ayşe was a patient and generous teacher, I can honestly say I will never be buying hamsi to cook at home. The deboning, degutting and deheading process was a little too much for me.

But if you want, you can pay the fish guy a few extra lira to do that disgusting work for you.

And if you don’t want to cook hamsi, go to your favorite meyhane now and order them before the season ends. This is what I’ll be doing.

Afiyet olsun!

  

Rough directions for Hamsi Tava or Fried Anchovies

1          kilo                  fresh hamsi (anchovies)
1          Tablespoon      vegetable oil

As needed                   salt

As needed                   cornflour

Wash the fish, break off the heads and degut the fish.

Briefly rinse and drain on paper towels.

Add the oil to a large non-stick pan. (In Turkey, you can even buy special hamsi tava frying pans.)

Season the cornflour with salt. Lightly dredge the fish through the cornflour.

Carefully, lay out the hamsi in a circle, filling the pan, in one single layer.

Over medium-high heat, fry the fish on one side till golden brown (about 3-4 minutes).

Then, carefully flip over the fish (as demonstrated in the photo above) and continue frying the other side until golden brown.

Serve with lemon wedges, a salad and cornbread. 

Stuffing the hamsi with Turkish cheddar cheese and parsley.

I'm very thankful for meeting friends like Ayşe here in Istanbul.

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Turkish Cooking with a Chef, Blogger

Living abroad is all about making connections.

Sometimes you make those connections in person or sometimes online through today’s various social media outlets. And every once in awhile, those two worlds collide.

That’s what recently happened to me.

Last Friday, I met up with Ozlem Warren of London-based Ozlem’s Turkish Table here in Istanbul.

Warren grew up in Antakya, a southeastern city in Turkey near the Syrian border, fell in love with a British man, moved away from Turkey, but took her love of Turkish cuisine with her. Now, she teaches private lessons and at cooking schools in England. She is currently spending a few weeks visiting her relatives and vacationing in Turkey.

But last night, lucky me, I got to take a Turkish cooking class with Warren at the Istanbul Culinary Institute. The same place where I teach here! (My next baking class, Introduction to Pastry, will be Aug. 28. You can sign up here, and you too can learn how to make NY-style cheesecake, a rich Devil’s Food Cake and more.)

Ozlem and me at the end of a hot night of cooking at the Istanbul Culinary Institute.

Warren’s Turkish cuisine class was interesting, filled with good tips and, most importantly, fun! The students were five Turkish women, two Istanbul expats and two tourists from Austria. I even met a Turkish woman who owns a cafe near Emirgan. 

In the class, we learned how to make two Antakya mezes – walnuts, red pepper paste and olive oil dip (cevizli biber) and smoked eggplant salad with garlic yogurt (patlıcanlı yoğurtlama). I’ve eaten cevizli biber meze several times, but this one had just the right level of spice. Not too hot!

Ozlem making the cevizli biber meze at the Istanbul Culinary Institute.

The creamy, garlicky eggplant meze that would be delicious would Ramazan pidesi!

The main course, where we got our hands dirty, was tray kebab with vegetables (tepsi kebabı). The potatoes aren’t traditional, but that’s how Warren’s mother makes it. To me, meat and potatoes always pair well together.

Mixing the ingredients for the kebab reminded me of my mother making Sunday meatloaf in Nebraska. And I mean every Sunday!

Of course, this kebab was much more flavorful than your standard, boring American meatloaf. The kebab was spiced with fresh parsley, cumin, red pepper flakes, garlic, salt and pepper and covered with a tomato-red pepper paste sauce.

Ozlem with the finished version of tray kebab with vegetables (tepsi kebabı).

For dessert, we stuffed dried apricots with walnuts and sugar to make cevizli kayısı tatlısı and served it with Turkish kaymak and ice cream. WOW!

Our stuffed apricots all lined up in rows ready to be baked and caramelize in the oven.

After working together in the kitchen for about 2 and a half hours, we all sat down, toasted glasses of wine and dug into our wonderful meal of Turkish cuisine from Antakya.

Thanks Ozlem! It was a delight and a pleasure to meet you and cook with you!

You can also read about Warren here: UK-based Turkish Chef Returns Home to Teach in Istanbul in the Hurriyet Daily News.

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Learning the ‘Turkish Flavours’

Unlike many of my expat friends here, I do not have a Turkish mother-in-law to teach me how to cook.

So far, I’ve relied on the few Turkish cookbooks I’ve purchased or borrowed and the advice of long-time residents to prepare “traditional” Turkish recipes.

But last week, I took a special opportunity to take a Turkish cooking class offered through the International Women of Istanbul. Selin Rozanes, an Istanbul native, teaches Turkish cooking classes in her beautiful Nişantaşı apartment through her business called Turkish Flavours. She also offers several Istanbul market tours, street food tours, culinary tours in Turkey and more. I hope to take one of her market tours next month.

Donning a black handmade apron, provided by Selin as part of the class, I was ready to start chopping and slicing. Hand those vegetables over!

The 1940s apartment has been remodeled with a prep area just off the salon. The room is fitted with a large island in the middle and is well organized with wooden cutting boards, knives, spices and other necessary tools. Along one wall is the gas range oven that we would be using to bake and cook our dishes. In the second kitchen in the back, Selin had a helper washing the many dishes and utensils we used.

We had an extensive menu to prepare that included the following 9 recipes:
- Sigara böreği - crispy pastry rolls with feta cheese and herbs
- Zeytinyağlı enginar - Artichokes in olive oil
- Karnıyarık - Split-belly eggplant
- Spicy bulgur pilaf
- Cacık - a garlicky yogurt mezze with cucumber and dill
- Yoğurtlu Havuç Salatası - Carrot-yogurt salad with tahini and walnuts
- Yeşil zeytin salatası - Green olive salad with pomegranate molasses
- Kaymaklı kuru kayısı - Apricots stuffed with clotted cream and garnished with pistachio
- Kaymaklı cevizli incir - Stuffed dried figs infused with honey and bay leaves

The class went by in a blur.

Selin showed us how to stuff and dip the apricots in ground pistachios.

Selin explained each dish as we went. I became the designated chopper once she learned of my culinary experience. “Chef, chop this,” she said.

I also liked that Selin varied from the more “traditional” Turkish recipes and added her own flair and pinch of spices to them. For example, the artichokes generally are cooked with peas and carrots. However, her recipe included handfuls of whole, peeled shallots, fresh fava beans and scallions. The dish was flavorful but tasted very light and spring-like.

This is exactly how I like to cook in the kitchen too. Very rarely do I ever follow a recipe verbatim. I tend to add more spices than stated, and I’m quite generous with the garlic and freshly ground black pepper.

My favorite dishes ended up being the stuffed apricots, the artichokes and the carrot salad. I also enjoyed learning how to make, stuff and roll the sigara böreği using the yufka, which is one of my favorite hot mezze dishes. I can’t wait to experiment with these recipes in my own kitchen soon!

Stuffed figs with walnuts

Cacik, sigara böreği and artichokes

Split-belly eggplant garnished with tomatoes and dill ready to be served

What I’ve learned, overall, is that Turkish cooking is fairly simple. It’s not complex and doesn’t require 20 ingredients to make one dish.

This class was a great experience to learn more about the new country I’m living in and how to make its cuisine, which is something I can enjoy years down the road no matter where our travels take us.

If you are visiting Istanbul or even live here and want to learn how to cook from an expert like I did, I highly recommend Selin’s Turkish cooking class.

Afiyet olsun!

Selin, me, and my classmates just before we sat down to enjoy our afternoon meal.

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